Technotrance, Illusions and Perspectives

This tip explores implementation of test cases for testing multiple EJB (stateless or stateful) in Embedded JBoss Container. Suppose if a test case is a client for multiple EJBs hosted in multiple jar files, this post will help you configure your test environment to deploy all the EJBs in the Embedded JBoss Container and run test cases against it.
The configuration is simple and is just three stepped process. Assume all the jars containing the EJBs are available as maven artifacts and the tests are deployed as a maven project, the following are sequence of steps:

1) In the project’s pom.xml, specify the maven-dependency-plugin under build/plugins as given below:

<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>copy-ejbs</id>
<phase>process-test-resources</phase>
<goals>
<goal>copy</goal>
</goals>
<configuration>
<artifactItems>
<artifactItem>
<groupId>my.package</groupId>
<artifactId>my.ejbmodule</artifactId>
<version>1.0.0</version>
<type>ejb</type>
</artifactItem>
<!-- Other EJB module artifacts -->
</artifactItems>
<outputDirectory>${project.build.testOutputDirectory}/lib</outputDirectory>
</configuration>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>

Here the plugin is copying the ejb modules to the target/test-classes/lib before test phase (during process-test-resources phase). If you a non-maven set of ejb module, one could use the maven-antrun-plugin to copy these jar files under target/test-classes/lib in process-test-resources phase.

2) Now since we are using Embedded JBoss as the container and we have the container configurations under src/test/resources, edit the src/test/resources/conf/bootstrap-beans.xml and append the following

<!-- My custom deployment -->
<bean name="ResourcesToDeploy4">
<property name="filter">
<inject bean="DeploymentFilter"/>
</property>
<property name="mainDeployer">
<inject bean="MainDeployer"/>
</property>
<property name="kernel">
<inject bean="jboss.kernel:service=Kernel"/>
</property>
<property name="directoriesByResource">
<list elementClass="java.lang.String">
<value>${jboss.embedded.bootstrap.resource.path}conf/jboss-service.xml/../lib</value>
</list>
</property>
</bean>

Here we are creating a deployment folder ../lib relative to conf/jboss-service.xml, where the ejb modules gets copied as explained in the previous step.

3)  Now in your test-case (implemented either JUnit/TestNG), implement a @BeforeClass annotated method to do the embedded jboss bootstrapping as given below

static MyEJB ejb1 = null;

@BeforeClass
public static void startup() {
Bootstrap bootstrap = Bootstrap.getInstance();
try {
if (!bootstrap.isStarted())
bootstrap.bootstrap();
} catch (DeploymentException deploy)
{}
InitialContext ctx = new InitialContext();
ejb1 =  (MyEJB)ctx.lookup("myejb");
}

All your other ejbs can as well looked upon like specified above.  During test runtime, you can check how embedded jboss is initializing and starting discovered EJB modules. This way one may not need to deployResource for every EJB defined.